Friday, June 23, 2017

PLUMMER'S CRACKLESS

Opening this week:

The Exception—Has any
actor since Paul Newman aged as well as Christopher Plummer? He seems to get
more majestic-looking every year, and he has more wry, mischievous charm now
than he did as a young man, by quite a large margin.

Having played the aged, gulled
Tolstoy in 2009’s The Last Station,
he now plays another washed-up historical figure, Kaiser Wilhelm II, in this roiling
yarn, the feature debut of Brit stage director David Leveaux. Based on Alan
Judd’s novel The Kaiser’s Last Kiss,
it’s set near the beginning of WWII in the Netherlands, where Wilhelm has been
living in comfortable exile with his wife, the Princess Hermine (Janet McTeer),
feeding ducks, chopping wood and brooding over the loss of, you know, WWI and
his throne.

The Nazis, who have just invaded
the Netherlands,
loathe and mistrust the Kaiser, but aren’t quite ready to eliminate a relic for
whom the German people retain a fondness. So they send a young SS Captain,
Brandt (Jai Courtney), disgraced by an earlier act of conscience, on the
dead-end assignment of guarding the old man against the possibility—a long
shot, he’s sure—of an assassination attempt.

As he glumly enters the Kaiser’s manse,
Brandt catches sight of a darkly beautiful housemaid, Mieke (Lily James). She
catches sight of him right back, and the two immediately develop one of those
unspoken sexual passions that arise so conveniently in tales of this sort. As
their intimacy increases and he learns, among other secrets, that Mieke is
Jewish, Brandt’s already tenuous loyalty to the Reich is tested.

For stretches The Exception seems like potent moral drama, and for other
stretches it seems outrageous, on the borderline of camp, like a sanitized
prequel to The Night Porter. Either
way, though, it’s a tense thriller. I found myself caring for these people
whether their plight was plausible or not.

All of the acting is strong, from the intelligent hunk Courtney
to James with her angry erotic avidity to McTeer’s pitiful Princess to Ben
Daniels as Wilhelm’s sad, loyal aide to Mark Dexter as a vexed Gestapo man. But
the anchor is Plummer, as the handsome, irrelevantly regal old Wilhelm, trying
without success to mask his bitterness and guilt behind a rueful, chuckling
humor.

Indeed, the only performance quite as vivid as Plummer’s comes
from Eddie Marsan in the small role of Himmler, who drops by with a proposal
for the Kaiser. The ever-resourceful Marsan’s portrait is deeply repellent and
terrifying—a murmuring, milquetoast monster.

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My work has appeared in publications ranging from the New Times weeklies (where I was a staff writer for several years) to USA Today, from Phoenix Magazine and Wrangler News and the East Valley Tribune to the Erie Times-News, Seattle Times and Detroit Metro Times to Rewind Magazine.

I'm that rare example of a living poet who has had a sonnet published in Weird Tales, and my poems have also appeared in Elysian Fields Quarterly.

I've acted in theatre productions in six states and the District of Columbia, and appear for about six seconds as an extra (a prison guard) in the John Waters film Cry-Baby.

I directed Shakespeare's Measure for Measure at Southwest Shakespeare Festival, and a short film called Holding Back the Dawn, based on a short story by my friend Barry Graham.

I was host of Another Saturday Night, a pop culture and film review show on KTAR radio.

I have produced, directed and acted in radio plays for NPR, KTAR and the Sun Sounds Radio service.